Tuesday, February 12, 2019

#BreakingNews 5 Churches in France Vandalized in a Week - with Excrement thrown on walls and Breaking of Tabernacle

Several Catholic buildings, from Yvelines to Tarn, in France, were vandalized last week.

In Maisons-Laffitte and Houilles, in the Yvelines, Dijon, but also in Nîmes and Lavaur, in the Tarn, degradations were committed in five Catholic churches last week. These are police and diocesan sources who have recounted these acts of vandalism.

The tabernacle of the Saint-Nicolas Church of Maisons-Laffitte was overthrown this Sunday, according to police sources. An investigation was opened and a man, a homeless man of 35 years, was taken into custody.

Last week in Houilles, still in the Yvelines, acts of vandalism were found in the church of Saint-Nicolas. The prefecture condemned "with the greatest firmness this serious and inadmissible violence against these places of worship".

The church targeted three times in 10 days

Degradations - Christ on the cross and a statue of the virgin thrown on the ground and broken, in particular - had already been noted at the end of January in the same church, according to the police.

Father Coeur, who officiates at the Saint-Nicolas church, tells our colleagues in the Parisian have undergone three degradations in the space of ten days. First, "Christ carrying his cross was thrown to the ground in the choir and the seat on which the priest sits was knocked down," he explains to the daily, stating that everything had been "patched up and handed over. in place "before the cross is again targeted. Last Monday, it is to a virgin and child polychrome terracotta nineteenth century was stolen. Then it was found "totally broken" and "irreparable".

Saturday, it is this time the diocese of Dijon who expressed his "sadness" in a tweet relaying photos of damage in the Church Notre-Dame de Dijon: a broken vase, hosts thrown on the altar, a tablecloth rolled into a ball.

Excrement on the walls

Vandalism was also reported Wednesday in a church in Nimes, located in the district of Lovers. The tabernacle was broken, hosts thrown on the walls and on the ground, various degraded religious objects and excrement thrown on the interior walls of the building. The prosecutor's office of Nimes opened an investigation entrusted to the police officers.

Earlier in the week, Tuesday at the end of the day, the fire was also set at an altar in a side chapel of the Saint-Alain de Lavaur cathedral, in Tarn, as the diocese reported on its website.

According to a report from the Ministry of the Interior, in 2017, 978 attacks on religious buildings and burials, including 878 against Christian sites, were counted.
Edited from Lexpress.fr